It’s fibbing good

BILLY LIAR
Paul Genty

Royal Exchange, Manchester, to July 12


Billy Liar? That’s a comedy, isn’t it?

The recesses of your memory might recall it that way, but the truth is rather different.

Waterhouse and Hall’s iconic story of Billy Fisher is no less than a tragicomedy of boredom, subdued spirit and conformity, a look at one of the last generations, of the Sixties, for whom responsibility and deference to one’s elders was the norm.

Billy Fisher (Harry McEntire, in a keen performance that makes you want to help Billy and strangle him at the same time) stifles in the rigidity of a life in which his relatively good intelligence and imagination are sneered at by his parents, his friends and girlfriends.

In playing up and against this, he invents lies that incur the wrath of everyone around him.

His serious girlfriend Liz (Emily Barber) is the only person in his orbit capable of leading him out of the rut that threatens to keep him on track forever.

When he doesn’t flee with the braver, like-minded girl to London then like thousands of others of his generation, he condemns himself.

Up and coming director Sam Yates directs the play without gimmicks but with a lively cast that manages to get under the skin of each character rather well.

Billy Liar really is funny, along the way, thanks both to the stories Billy spins and to the bluster and pained authority of his constantly put-upon mother and father (Lisa Millett and Jack Deam), his simpering goody-goody girl Barbara (Rebekah Hinds), his other, raucous girlfriend Rita (Katie Moore) and interfering grandmother (Sue Wallace) and pal Arthur (Aaron Anthony).

The set is depressingly front-room simple in brown, the play a genuine Sixties social commentary that stands the test of time, and the production a winner.